Project Work as a Locus of Learning: The Journey Through Practice
Many organizations ‘re-invent the wheel’ by failing to capture and spread what has been learned from particular projects. This inability to exploit the learning from projects has worrying implications for the growing popularity of the project form as a way of organizing work. This chapter identifies the role which project work plays as a source of learning which emerges alongside, within, and sometimes against, communities of practice. The theoretical framework produced by this analysis is explored through brief case-study descriptions of three projects which produced very different outcomes in terms of the generation, capture and spread of learning. This allows us to derive some conclusions as to the factors influencing the role of projects as a source of learning within organizations, and the implications for attempts to exploit such learning as an organizational resource.
Keywords: project, community, social practice, organizational learning, innovation
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .